study of the law was somewhat hin dered by a shortage of scrolls. There were no printing presses and all their Bibles were hand-written on parchment. To offset, in a measure, the shortage of Torahs, the Yemenite Jews sat or stood around the scroll and learned to read it from what ever angle they saw it. Thus they learned to read not only from right to left as Hebrew is written, but also with the scroll upside down (from left to righ t), or from the right side (upwards on each line), or from the left side (downwards, towards the reader). An eminent Bible teacher, Dr. Wm. Hull, had heard several times of this strange reading ability but had never seen it demonstrated, un til one day an old Yemenite Jew, still in his oriental clothes, came into the mission with his son, a young man about twenty. They wanted to see a New Testament in Hebrew. Without noticing, Dr. Hull had handed the book to the young man upside down. He opened the book from the left side, which would be the back of a Hebrew book held in an upright position. Then he noticed that it was upside down. Instead of turning the book the right way, he seemed to pretend to read it. Dr. Hull thought to himself that probably the boy could not read Hebrew and that he was just trying to deceive him. He asked the young man how long he and his father had been in Israel. He replied, “Six years.” This was the time of the great airlift from Yemen and Dr. Hull realized that here was one of those about whom he had read. To the young fellow it actually may have been easier, or at least as familiar to him, to read the book upside down as the right way. He told Dr. Hull he could read also from either side. When the mass move from Yemen began in 1949, a refugee camp had to be established near the city of Aden and at times as many as th ir teen thousand were huddled together 32
struction of Solomon’s Temple. They captured Sanaa, the capital city of Yemen, and remained in that land. Later, when Ezra returned to Jeru salem to build the second temple, he sent word for them to come back to the land of Israel and to help in the work. Tradition says that the Ye menite Jews refused to return at that time for they knew that the second temple would share the fate of the first. They are reported to have said that the time for the Mes siah to come had not yet arrived. “In the fifth century A.D. the king accepted Judaism as the religion of the land, which at that particular time was called Himyar. The last king to reign in independent Himyar was a Jew. After this the Ethiopians ruled the land, then the Persians, before the coming of Islam, early in the eighth century, to conquer the land. Under Mohammedan rule the Jews became second-class citizens and life became difficult for them. “Some of the restrictions upon Jews were that a Jew could not ride a beast of burden, for that would raise him higher than a walking Moslem; he could not build a house higher than a Moslem, nor raise his voice before him. He must pay a spe cial head tax and live in a ghetto. The Jew was regarded as unclean by Moslems. He had to rise before a Moslem, greet him first and always walk on his left hand. Special dress was required for a Jew so that he could not conceal his identity. He had no legal protection. A Jewish child left an orphan was immediately taken from the Jews and raised up a Moslem. Up to the time of the final departure of the Jews from Yemen, it was forbidden for a Jew to leave the country. Any who were able to steal out were unable to take prop erty or belongings with them. “As a result of their poverty, mostly caused by the intolerable re strictions under which they lived, Yemenite Jews became small of sta ture, thin and emaciated.” Their
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